MENTAL AND PHYSICAL FACTORS INVOLVED IN EDUCATION. 305 



(5) The sociological phenomena of early life as observed in civilised and 



uncivilised peoples and in animals. 



(6) The educational applications resulting from the foregoing, as seen 



in the school, the family, and in Nature. 



No science has in the past developed so rapidly as paedology. Its great 

 importance was immediately and universally recognised, as we see from the fact 

 that so many and so various institutions devoted to this subject have already 

 been established. I can count on the spur of the moment in Europe alone sixteen 

 Child-Study Associations, twenty-one reviews devoted to Child-Study, eleven 

 laboratories and institutes of paedology, and no fewer than eight congresses on 

 various aspects of the subject have already met. In North and South America 

 and in Japan the number of societies and journals is very great, but unfortunately 

 little known. 



It is easy to foresee that in no very remote future the majority of the univer- 

 sities of the world will have established psedological courses with laboratory 

 arrangements on thoroughly scientific lines. 



These communications sufficiently indicate the importance which is 

 attached to the subject in France and in Belgium, an interest which, in 

 the latter country, has led to the establishment of an official body, 

 LTnstitut National Beige de Pedologie, which, under the presidency 

 of the Directeur-General de l'Enseignement primaire, is organising 

 systematic work on a large scale. The new society has already estab- 

 lished a journal, ' Les Annales Pedologiques,' which made its first 

 appearance in October 1909, since the last meeting of the Association. 



In our own country we may note in this connection the forth- 

 coming appearance of a new journal, ' The Child,' which is a welcome 

 sign of the growing interest in educational and other allied researches, 

 and the widespread activities of the British Child Study societies con- 

 tinue to increase in importance. 



In view of the large amount of work being done in other countries, 

 the Committee set out to inquire what was actually being done here, 

 and what special resources were actually available. They knew of 

 nothing to correspond with the Psedological Laboratory at Antwerp, 

 but it was clear that the psychologists were beginning to take the 

 matter up and that possibly more was going on than was generally 

 known. Their inquiry shows that special funds are rarely available; 

 such work as is being done is chiefly in the hands of students who are 

 working in the first place for academic recognition. Here and there 

 privately interested people are working on their own initiative and at 

 their own expense; otherwise inquiries are being for the most part 

 conducted in the available time of university teachers, who are already 

 occupied with the general direction of a laboratory or in doing other 

 teaching work. 



The replies to the Committee's inquiries may be summarised as 

 follows : — 



From Cambridge, Dr. Myers writes that no special funds are avail- 

 able, but that various researches in the psychology of school children 

 are being carried on. These researches are concerned with geometrical 

 optical illusions, colour vision, and colour vocabularies, memory 

 (rational and mechanical learning), &c. One research has just been 

 completed, continuing the work of Ziehen and others on Mental Asso- 

 ciation in Children. The possibility that psychology may be made 



